Bush spotted owl plan faulted for habitat risks

The Bush administration's plan to recover the northern spotted owl underestimates the risk that wildfires and logging of large trees will damage the owl's habitat, according to scientific review of the plan released today.

The critique also said part of the plan involving owl habitat was "deeply flawed" and said certain parts "do not use scientific information appropriately."

The criticism follows earlier claims by a conservationist who helped write the plan that high-level administration officials manipulated the plan to make it friendlier to federal logging in Oregon's Coast Range.

Wildlife officials listed the owl as a threatened species in 1990 as its older forest habitat fell to logging. The cutting has slowed dramatically since then, but the owl faces a new threat from aggressive barred owls invading its territory.

The recovery plan will influence levels of logging and other development, especially on federal land in the region.

The new plan, drafted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, had already been battered by earlier critical reviews. The harsh criticism led the agency to try to rebuild credibility by contracting with Sustainable Ecosystems Institute, based in Portland, for a broader review by top wildlife and forest scientists from around the country.

Fish and Wildlife Service spokeswoman Joan Jewett said today that the goal of the new review was to "separate science from opinion" and identify the most current scientific thinking about the owl and its habitat. The owl plan is now one of the most heavily scrutinized documents of its kind, she said.

The agency will consider the findings as it finishes work on a final owl recovery plan, due out in May, she said.

Earlier critics argued that the recovery plan exaggerated the threat of the barred owl, which shoulders aside spotted owls, so that logging appeared to be less of a threat than it really is.

The new science review concluded that the plan did not overstate the threat of the barred owl. But it said the plan does underestimate the risk that owl habitat will be lost to logging and wildfires.

"We view the continued conservation of (old growth) to be paramount for northern spotted owl recovery," the reviewers wrote. They said risks to the survival of the species remain substantial.

"Unless the Final Recovery Plan results in a concerted effort to take action on these threats, we foresee the situation progressively deteriorating," they wrote.

The federal plan especially underestimated the threat of wildfires burning up owl habitat in the drier parts of its range, such as the east side of the Cascade Range, the reviewers wrote. They said the threat is likely to increase given the accumulating tinder in forests in those areas and expected changes in climate.

The federal recovery plan assumed most spotted owl habitat would remain intact, even though that may not be true, the reviewers said. That's in part because the plan didn't call for older forest reserves that would protect habitat over the long term.

Such reserves were first set up by the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, a Clinton administration attempt to balance logging with wildlife needs. Many conservation groups suspect the Bush administration of trying to dismantle the 1994 plan to make way for more logging.

Driving their suspicion is a new U.S. Bureau of Land Management blueprint for federal forests in Oregon's Coast Range known as the Western Oregon Plan Revision. The BLM proposal suggests doing away with permanent forest reserves and allowing more logging, which has strong support from rural counties suffering as timber revenues dry up.

Critics saw the lack of reserves in the owl plan as paving the way for the BLM plan to go forward without reserves too.

The scientific reviewers said it's not clear from the recovery plan how much owl habitat would be protected.

They also said that in some drier forests, such as on the east side of the Cascades, the only way to maintain spotted owl habitat will be to actively manage the forests through thinning and other means to reduce the risk of severe wildfires.

They also said that shooting barred owls to reduce their competition with spotted owls may be warranted. The federal recovery plan suggested controlling barred owls.

U.S. Senators from Oregon, Washington and California - except for Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore. - sent a letter to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne last week asking him to subject the final version of the owl recovery plan to public comment and scientific review.